


how can I, being who I am

by linoleum_ice



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Car Racing, Alternate Universe - Sports, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up Together, Light Angst, Rated T for Trashmouth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26628142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linoleum_ice/pseuds/linoleum_ice
Summary: He first meets Andromache when he is 12.She is tall. She is 15. She’s got a neon green helmet tucked under her arm like a football and she doesn’t smile when she shakes his hand.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	how can I, being who I am

He first meets Andromache when he is 12. It’s his first race outside of France in a Swiss town he can’t pronounce and his father ferries him around to meet his competitors with a hand between his shoulder blades. 

She is tall. She is 15. She’s got a neon green helmet tucked under her arm like a football and she doesn’t smile when she shakes his hand. Their fathers speak in English briefly before Seb is led away again. He looks over his shoulder to look at her (because she’s got a face he’s never seen before). She waves at him, with the same steely expression and a hardness in her eyes which are very grey. 

He waves back. 

His father tells him not to be intimidated and that she’s only taller now because she’s a girl. He is quickly reassured that he will grow taller in no time and that she will lose interest in karting. There’s a certainty in the way his father says it, but Seb hopes he’s wrong because out of the whole grid, Andromache is probably the best and it’s _her_ he wants to beat. 

===

The next race he’s caught up in a bit of a kerfuffle on turn 3 of the first lap. It takes him precious seconds to recover, and by then he’s been left in the dust by the rest of the pack along with the two other karts involved. 

The other kids are cursing, but Seb doesn’t register it. He qualified 7th. He’s got a lot of track to make up. 

===

He’s confronted right after the race by a boy who is maybe 14. He barely has the breathing space to take his gloves and helmet off before the boy stomps up to him and begins shouting. He thinks it might be German and it might be Dutch, but either way, he can’t understand a word of it, so he stands there, brought down in a shock from the high of a 5th place finish. 

He wants to look around for his father, but his neck has dried up like cement and he can only watch as the other boy points at him, poking him in the chest, and just keeps yelling. 

The boy is very loud. 

Seb thinks that maybe if he was just left alone here with the boy, he might never stop shouting, but he doesn’t find out because they are both interrupted by more yelling, only this time it’s Andromache.

She’s stalking their way and taking off her gloves in sharp, angry tugs. She points at the boy while clutching them tightly. 

“Stop it.” She says with a tone that suggests irritation, but an expression that suggests fury. “Er ist zwölf Jahre alt.” She says to the boy and points at Seb instead, but with his heart fluttering with relief, he realises it’s not him she’s angry at. 

They go back and forth in what is maybe German and maybe Dutch until the boy’s parents come to collect him (they say nothing about the shouting and shoot Seb a dirty look) and he grumbles off with his arms crossed. 

“He says you did not leave him enough space so he crashed into you, even though it is his fault for making a bad move on Antonio and is not your fault you locked up,” Andromache tells him before he really has a chance to get his head around what’s just happened. “He is stupid and you should not listen to him.”

Seb blinks up at her. She is very tall. 

“I don’t know what he’s saying.” He says.

“I know. You are French.” She says.

It takes him a second because he doesn’t remember ever telling her that (or anything else, for that matter), but he reckons it’s just the way he speaks English. “You don’t sound German or Dutch.” He says.

“I am from Greece.” She says.

“Okay.” He says. 

“Okay,” she shrugs, before turning around to pick up her helmet where she dropped it on the floor and leaving towards the stands. 

===

The next race is delayed because of rain. 

Seb wants to sit with the circle of other 11 and 12-year-olds that are playing card games and watching youtube videos on their phones, but most of them are British and it doesn’t look like they’re open to new members. He thinks he might have made friends with a Monégasque boy, so Seb would probably sit with _him_ , but apparently the boy got chicken pox on Friday and he’s not allowed to race until his doctor says so.

So he’s just on his own, criss-cross-applesauce on a plastic chair under a tarp while his father takes a business call. 

In the corner of his eye, Andromache walks out of the garage facility with her mother. Her mother holds out an umbrella and loops an arm around Andy and Seb thinks, _so that’s where she’s been_. He has something to say to her. 

He taps his father on the thigh and points at her with an urgency (in case she walks away really quickly. It’s a worry because her legs are very long.), to which his father nods and makes a shoo-ing motion with his hands. 

Seb has to jog to her because he doesn’t have an umbrella and he didn’t think this through. He slows down to a walk once he’s a few metres away from her but picks it up again because her mother does a come-here kind of wave and he slots into their umbrella space. 

Andromache looks at him sceptically, but with scepticism, he thinks, that’s not entirely bad. 

“Γεια σου. Ευχαριστώ.” _Hello. Thank you._ Says Seb, with hands balled up into fists, squeezing the nerves into two tight points in his body. 

And for the first time Seb has ever seen, Andromache grins, grey eyes lighting up with a pleased sort of spark. 

“Salut,” she says, even though her pronunciation is pretty bad. “How do you say ‘you’re welcome’?” 

“De rien,” Seb replies, slowly, and accentuating the throatier parts so she can hear how it works. She butchers it, but he doesn’t mind. “What is your name?” She asks immediately afterwards.

“Sébastien. But if you want, you can call me Seb.”

She reaches her hand out and he shakes it. “My name is Ανδρομάχη. But Andy is easier for English speakers. And French speakers, I think.” And whatever she said her name was, definitely didn’t sound like what his dad was saying, so he figures ‘Andy’ is his safest bet as well. 

At this point, Andy’s mum says something to her and Seb bet’s it’s something about the fact that they’ve been awkwardly standing here in the rain, but she’s looking at the both of them with a maternal sort of tenderness that it makes Seb want to hold her hand and stand here with them a bit longer. 

“Μαμά wants to know if you want something to drink,” says Andy, turning back to him. “There is a vending machine in the repair area. They have cola—” she raises her can to show him, he didn’t realise she was holding one until now, being razer focused on getting the foreign words out correctly “—and some other Italian drinks.” She points back towards the garage, also with her can, which Seb wonders if it didn’t pick up rainwater from all that waving around. 

He isn’t really looking for a drink at the moment, but he does want something to do, so he starts to open his mouth to agree. Instead, he says, “I don’t have money with me.”

“Μαμά can pay,” Andy says without an ounce of hesitation. 

“You didn’t ask her,” Seb says.

“I know she will say yes,” Andy assures him, but presumably asks anyway.

Andy makes an I-told-you-so face at him. She does say yes. 

“Ευχαριστώ,” Seb says to her mother before the word escapes him and she looks at him again, saying something softly in Greek with such a kind expression that Seb is momentarily taken aback. 

Andy taps him on the shoulder. 

“De rien,” She translates. 

===

For the rest of the season, Andy wipes the floor with the rest of them, but Seb doesn’t mind _that_ much because he knows he’s not her age and he’s still pulling top 10 finishes, which are, more often than not, also top 5. 

In his free time at the track, he spends it catching up with Andy since no one else seems to want to talk to her, maybe because she looks angry all the time, and maybe because she’s a girl, but either way, she looks lonely, and Seb wants to remedy that. 

She’s pretty cool to be around, he hopes the other boys will realise that, and she knows a lot more about karting than he does. He’ll climb up to her step on the stands where she’s flicking through her German vocab flashcards and he’ll ask about what she thought of his practice lap. Then she’ll either tell him she needs to focus right now and ask him to test her, or she’ll gather them up and tap them on the bench to put them in line. When she deposits them back into her plastic folder, she’ll say to him—

“You can break later on the apex of turn 9, carry more speed into the straight.”

—or—

“Be careful on the hairpin, you will lose the back end and hurt yourself.”

—or—

“Pull out to the right when the lights go out. Last time I started here on the same row as Nils, he took me out because he’s an ηλίθιος.”

—and he’ll nod solemnly, mentally writing it into his race plan. After that, she’ll either let him stay to talk about actual motor-racing and school shenanigans, or she’ll tell him not to bother her and to harass the Monégasque boy (whose name is Jacque) instead. 

He knows Andy likes his company more than she lets on, but he’d always been under the impression that it’s mostly a situational arrangement. Once she leaves for the ADAC Formula 4—the reason she’s learning German—he doesn’t think she’ll speak to him again until they next cross paths. 

He’s proven wrong. And he doesn’t even know _how_ wrong he is when she proves it. 

Near the end of the season, she asks him where he’s planning to go when he steps up to cars, and Seb tells her he wants to stay in France, probably French F4, since FR 2.0 folded three years ago. To that, she had nodded, staring off at some imaginary speck in the distance—almost like she hadn’t been listening even though he knew she was—and said ‘okay’. 

===

She wins the championship because of course she does, she’s amazing, there could be no other outcome. They give her fake champagne to drink on the podium and Seb whistles at her in the crowd by blowing between his thumbs like she had taught him. She laughs and whistles back. 

At the car park, he finds her and her parents before they leave and he thinks she’s probably been looking for him as well because they’re just standing by the car, waiting. 

“Seb!” She jogs up to him, momentum crushing them into a hug. 

“Toutes nos félicitations!” Seb almost yells in her face, letting loose the pent up excitement he’d been feeling since the end of the race. 5th place in the championship is nothing to be scoffed at, considering the lineup this year, and everyone around him seems to think it’s only upwards from here. 

“Ah, thank you!” She grins, patting him on the head, the annoying way she does to emphasise her height. He bats her hand away, only because she’s done it so many times, it’s routine. “You are doing well, Seb. I will see you in Nogaro next, next season, okay? When you are 14.” She says, moving her hands down to shake his shoulders. 

“Nogaro?” It’s a French town. Seb is confused. 

“Yes. For French F4. Be there. I will be waiting for you,” she says, suddenly serious, and holding his shoulders tightly. Her fingers are bony and a little bit cold. He focuses on this fact instead of the fact that she has rerouted her entire career trajectory on the promise that he’ll make an honest run at going pro because that fact is too scary. 

“Okay,” says Seb, for lack of anything more intelligent. 

“Okay,” replies Andy. She squeezes his shoulders and then drops her hands. “Au revoir, amis.” She says over her shoulder, waving as she turns to leave.

“Αντιο σας,” He calls back. He watches Andy get into the car until his father snaps him out of it by calling his name. 

===

And that’s just how it goes for Seb for the next few years or so. Andy sets him a challenge and he rises to meet it. They race together for a season (though not necessarily in direct competition because at this stage, 3 years is still chasm of experience), and then Andy moves on to greener, higher-powered pastures, where she expects him to meet her in one or two years. 

French F4, Formula 3, Formula 2—there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind where Andy is headed now because where the openly sexist motorsport canon had expected—neé _hoped_ —she would level off to a good-but-not-quite-enough, she had pushed through and she had _killed it_. They wanted a girl who stagnated a step away from the highest level, to echo back the beliefs they held like a gun. They wanted a Calderon. They _got_ a Verstappen. 

So where does that leave Seb? In terms of pure talent, he’s got nothing on Andy, or some of her brighter peers, but he works hard and gets results, and that’s enough. At least for now. Despite that, besides general performance, he _is_ very good at one thing, and if he does one thing well, he does _really_ well. In racing, that thing is tire management. 

It comes naturally to him, not just the feeling of the car as an extension of his body, the vibrations of the track running from his legs to his head, not just the whine of the chassis as it takes the torque, or the tiny shifts in track temperatures that are radioed to him like clockwork. No, it’s that Seb is unnaturally, _scarily_ good at understanding what the race does to his tires. 

It’s a decent skill to have, especially in the lower series where everything is chaotic and ever-changing and the only constant weekend after weekend is the tires. Seb is recognised for it. Most of his highlights are him pulling ahead while his competitors wrestle with blistered rubber and overheating. His teams love him for it. He’s nothing if not consistent, and he gives good feedback for the engineers. 

But he’s no Andy. 

And people _love_ saying it to him. 

Seb supposes some of it is to be expected, seeing as he’s followed the same path through motorsport as she has, and they’re effectively in each other’s pockets. The reporters lap it up, even though they can’t quite decide if it’s a heartwarming friendship or a bitter one-sided rivalry. And then there’s the occasional drama bloodhound that catches a whiff of Woman! and Man! and immediately starts barking up his ass. 

At first, Seb had tried to describe their relationship, that she’s a mentor and a friend and he would follow her to the ends of the earth if she would only ask, but that, predictably, only poured more gasoline to the fire, owing to the fact that motorsport journalists can’t comprehend complex interpersonal relationships. 

Andy is beautiful in a way he scarcely understands. When he looks at her, _really_ looks at her, he feels as though he’s sitting in the mouth of a creature much larger and more profound than he, and he has been left alive only because it gave him a hall pass when it was a mere metre in length. 

His brain, squishy and very human, does not know where to even begin when it broaches the idea of a crush. It would be like tossing a store-bought valentine card into the void—the sublime. 

This is what he wants to say whenever someone insinuates anything romantic between him and Andy. But what he says instead is the, shortest, least informative answer he can get away with, while trying not to look dead inside. 

He envies Andy insofar that she doesn’t get these kinds of gossip questions. Partly because the journalists that interview her are big enough to make an actual effort not to come off as sexist (some of the time), and partly because they don’t think he’s important enough to her to ask. Which is not reassuring, but if Seb was bothered by that sort of inane speculation, he’d probably have lost his mind by now. 

===

During the tail-end of the offseason, Andy invites him to spend a weekend with her in Milton Keynes before she has to start work with her new team. She’s down a season and a half in Formula one, 10 points under her belt so far in a drive that usually struggles to make Q2. Which is mindblowing. She’s amazing. And now she’s signed on to a car that actually has podium promise. 

“If I don’t get a trophy this year, assume I’ve been abducted and replaced with a doppelgänger,” Andy tells him as he drives their newly rented car to the hotel. He can tell she’s still brushing up on her German because she says ‘doppelgänger’ the right way. “I’m serious. If I don’t get any podium champagne, there’s actually something fucking wrong with me.”

“That’s stupid,” Seb says as he flicks on the turn signal. “You don’t even know how the car drives like.”

She turns in her seat to face him like she’s genuinely offended. “If I can drive a Haas, I can drive an Aston Martin. Last year’s livery went as fast as a lawnmower and I put it in the points. I can win a top three.”

Seb makes a point not to roll his eyes. “God, the arrogance on this one,” he says with mock outrage. 

Andy pats him on the head. “Oh, you love to see it.”

===

At night, Andy’s new teammate Andrei invites them out clubbing to join him in that grand old Russian tradition of getting spectacularly drunk. They lose him in 15 minutes flat which really does not inspire confidence in Seb about the workplace synergy at Andy’s new team, but she seems to take it in stride, so he figures it’s not a big deal. 

Between the head-pounding music and the jet-fuel shots, Seb gets a pretty good buzz going in the new way he’s found himself enjoying a lot since he turned 18 half a year ago. 

Andy isn’t taller than him anymore and it’s times like these—as he leans in beside her to hear what she’s saying—when he feels that odd loss most poignantly. He used to be reassured by the need to tip his head up to look at her and the 12-year-old child in him feels like he’s lost her already. The 18-year-old he actually _is_ , worries she’s going somewhere he can’t follow any longer.

When she pulls away from colourfully criticising the taste of tequila, Seb realises just how close they’ve been packed together, with her arm around his shoulders, now face to face. 

“Γεια,” Seb says with a soft fondness that surprises even him. 

Her eyes, tainted purple by the dark lights, searches his face, while her free hand comes up to hold his cheek. She tilts her head while her mouth opens minutely and then they’re kissing. His lips move against hers as he holds on to her sides, treading on the hard planes of her muscles before resting gently at her hips. 

She doesn’t kiss him with lust or passion, nor the faithful familiarity to a well-worn relationship. No, if it’s even possible, and somehow she makes it so, they kiss like friends. 

Seb is the first to pull away, and not because he needs to breath.

“Don’t leave me, Ανδρομάχη, I need you. S’il vous plaît,” pleads Seb, his voice breaks with an unidentifiable emotion. 

She says nothing, but she brings her other hand to his cheek as well and holds him tightly, fingers splayed from his temples to his chin, to keep him from floating off. If only just for tonight. She doesn’t promise him anything, because it’s not up to her. It’s up to him and maybe that’s what he’s always been most afraid of. That in the end, he only had himself to blame. 

She smiles, eyes melancholic and kisses him again, a brief, firm press, then she looks at him and says, “Let’s dance.”

It’s not a question. Seb lets her lead him by the hand into the pulsating crowd, because if nothing else pans out, at least they can dance. 

**Author's Note:**

> no disrespect to tatiana calderón, you absolutely go girl
> 
> my multifandom [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/linoleum-ice) where you are more than welcome to yell at me  
> I can also be found lurking on the [tog discord server](https://discord.gg/6ampwS)


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